Pretentious boring and who cares, I could not believe this film won the best film prize at the 2012 Rome film festival it must have been a bad year for films in the official competition. The film about bored teenagers in El Paso, TX who look like there were ripped off Calvin Kline a fashion ad, bad acting bad sex, and of course stereotyping border patrol agents as bad people who are to get you and make life miserable. Larry Clark should learn from his greater film like Kids and Bully and remember when he could actually make films and not bore audiences to death. nothing much to say about a film with nothing much to tell.

Had potential, but squanders it.A movie set in a small Texas town, near the border with Mexico. Follows a few characters in their dull, everyday lives, and how they are all affected by the presence of the Border Patrol.The movie had heaps of potential, especially with regard to the issue of illegal immigration in the US. How this affects race relations, especially with Hispanic people, was also a great possibility.However, while it touches on these issues, there is no real, or at least thoughtful, examination. The movie might as well have been set in the middle of the US in an all-white community it was so superficial.The setting is really just a vehicle for a random, pointless plot (and I use the word "plot" very broadly here). The conclusion is quite impactful, but it almost doesn't have a context, what goes before is so unfocused.Many of the scenes are there just for shock value, but you expect nothing less from writer-director Larry Clark (director of Kids, Bully and Ken Park). Dialogue often consists of long monologues, telling some tale of personal woe but with no real context, interspersed with simplistic, pop, cereal-box philosophy. It often feels like you're watching someone being interviewed for a documentary, especially when that someone doesn't really want to be there.Throw in performances that vary from OK to utter rubbish and you have an incredibly poor movie. Some of the performances are among the worst I have ever seen in a movie (and I've seen some of Kristen Stewart's movies...). Lindsay Jones as the teacher is mind-bogglingly bad.Avoid.

...is what seems this film is striving for at first. Ignoring Larry Clark's notorious reputation of a cinematic perv and exploiter of young, underweight and under aged non-actors (quoted: I wondered about the availability of porn everywhere and how it affected what they thought about sex, what it was, what influence it had...). He makes films about specific not-for-everybody subjects and does not hide his fascination by it. Fair enough. The problem here is not weather to approve or disapprove Clark's fetishistic obsession by young & aimless, beautiful & doomed, or his over the top raw shots of them having sex, doing drugs or shooting people (Kids, Ken Park, Wassup Rockers prepared us for it) but his stubborn persistence in denying the strength and the possible depth of the material.His lazy semi- documentaristic approach makes it all more so interesting, just that it feels as if he's not in control of the outcome...And that can be tricky if you're dealing with such cold-blooded realism. Though amazing cinematography and mood cover for the lack of narrative and acting force, Clark likes to show off his talent in photography and lets his story suffer for it.Marfa girl revolves around a half-Mexican charismatic 16 yr- old skater boy in a self-titled town in Texas, which is another character of the movie. Located on the border of US and Mexico it is the perfect setting for all kinds of weird stories and conflicts. The mixture of locals and outsiders, "breeds" and racist psychopaths, like the patrol officer Tom played by Jeremy St. James. He is a savage and brutal sociopath that, for some inexplicable reason, gets away with everything, whether showing Adam's Mom "blue waffle" pictures or abusing every single person he meets. As we learn by the end, he is in pathological relationship with pain, weather inflicted upon him or on other people... So called "circle of violence" that goes on until something really bad happens. Though St. James' performance is great and believable in every second, I find the character in the end abruptly degraded and pushed to fit the plot assignment, pretty much like the rest of them. Marfa girl, misleading "main character" of the film played by the fresh model (what else) Drake Burnette is like a patch for the others, bringing in a breeze of fresh air and liberation from their established patterns and beliefs, but coming off more as snobby and reckless then true and free spirited. She is an Artist in residence, white and privileged but nevertheless doomed and lost as her fellow townies. Maybe that's the part I feel the most ambivalent about in Clark's films. The fact he doesn't really give any chance to his characters. As if in his eyes they are all losers by birth certificate.There are two amazing sequences in the film that made me think it would take it to a whole new level. One is an off-beat dialogue between Adam's mother and Mexican spiritual woman and her brother, involving dead parrots and their emotional bondage with them. As weird as it may sound, this was the most genuine and natural part of the film. Second one is the sequence between the Marfa girl and young Adam where she tries to pass on her liberal, kind of feminist, values of free love and double standards in male/female relations. It's the talk that feels more natural then all the stiffed sex scenes and unnecessary violence in the end. It also shows that the actors are not really that bad or inexperienced but, actually, well directed, portraying true awkwardness of the outsiders- inhabitants of the infamous American canal. I really loved those seemingly effortless dives into complexities, coming from faces of Dazed and Confused magazine covers...I am more interested in seeing their emotional landscape,their quirky philosophies and thoughts on life then the platitude of sex, drugs and violence that fits the frame all too familiar.They are all kids (with less edge than the original "Kids") and their paths are still not determined, in spite of their aimlessness and utter lack of interest and integrity.The end result feels as if that no-future philosophy of ghost town and its Martian Marfa citizens, so pointedly and viscerally portrayed, was forced into some kind of a tragedy just to fulfill the plot assignment.Too bad Clarke didn't feel it was worthy of more thorough investigation, or maybe he found it boring comparing to visually more satisfying exploration of his fantasies.

Larry Clark likes to make movies which shock. Particularly about teenagers. They f*ck and swear and sometimes kill (Bully). On the other hand, William Golding's Lord of the Flies is on the reading list in most English language high schools around the world. Nothing Larry Clark has done can outdo the horror of those kids on an island.Homo sapiens are a brutal and savage species, probably responsible for the elimination of Neanderthal man and since then we have sent thousands of species into extinction, from mammoths, to bison, to the dodo. If there's a bad animal around, we're it.Clark like Golding is busy with representing the what is, ripping off of your rose-coloured glasses and then stomping on them to boot. Yes, your girlfriend in high school betrayed you. Deliberately. And your son's girlfriend is probably betraying him now too. It's just what people do. Your wife probably cheated on you at least once or twice too. Go and read Jane Goodall's study of chimpanzees: how they mate and how they stalk their neighbours and kill.Anyway back to Marfa Girl: it's the same unlikeable group of teenagers smoking up and screwing as we've seen in other Clark movies. This time it's on the US/Mexican border. There are some very dislikable adult border patrol officers and some slightly less dislikable promiscuous kids. It's a film about ideas and loyalties. There are some extended Socratian dialogues between kids and cops, cops and cops.Those ideas are played out through the bodies and lives of the Clark's kids. Unlike in a Rohmer film, ideas are not apart from human existence. Ideas have a real human price.Performances are convincing all round from mothers to daughters to cops. I really didn't like either Adam (Adam Mediano) or Marfa Girl (Drake Burnette). But that's not their job to make me like them. Their responsibility is to play their role convincingly and that they did.If you are looking to be uplifted or dream of a brighter tomorrow, no Larry Clark film is for you. If you are looking to take a cold hard look at today's passage from childhood to adulthood, Larry Clark is your man.I'm not sure I liked Marfa Girl, but I respect the craft. Anyone concerned with border issues will find a lot to think about. There's a tall pile of DVD's of films waiting more important to me than Marfa Girl. While I respect Larry Clark's craft (I was lucky enough to see a premiere of Bully at TIFF with Clark in attendance in 2001), one of the reasons I am among the first to watch and buy is its direct online distribution. Direct digital distribution is the only future for independent film. Larry Clark is both wise and brave to choose exclusively online digital distribution with no cut to iTunes or any other of the conglomerates.It's an experiment worth supporting. If works the quality and the honesty of Marfa Girl are what direct distribution brings us, the future of independent film looks brighter than it has in over ten years.If you are on the fence, please give Larry Clark your support to send a clear signal to both independent film makers and to Hollywood. Give us something better than the sequels and focus grouped rubbish which commercial filmmaking has become and we'll pay for it.The online viewing experience was very easy. You pay via Paypal with no extended offer nonsense or other advertising and you get a login key which lets you see Marfa Girl in very good quality HD right away. Absolutely no problem playing it in the browser.